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authorNorbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>2019-09-02 13:46:59 +0900
committerNorbert Preining <norbert@preining.info>2019-09-02 13:46:59 +0900
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+\author[Michel Goossens]{Michel Goossens\\CERN\\\texttt{m.goossens@cern.ch}}
+\title{Report on 1994 Euro\TeX\ in Gda\'nsk}
+\begin{Article}
+After a Fokker 50 took me in about one hour from Copenhagen to
+Gda\'nsk, it was about midday on Sunday September 26th, when I
+stepped out of the plane and was greeted by a beautiful blue sky
+and summer-like temperatures. A trip by taxi of 41 km around the
+southern part of Gda\'nsk brought me in about 30 minutes to the
+Orle holiday center in Sobieszewo, a resort on the Baltic some 20
+km east of the city. The hotel was located 100 metres from the
+beach, and already straight after lunch I had the pleasure of
+walking along the wide sandy beach in search of amber and shells,
+while discussing \TeX{} and other text processing related problems
+with several colleagues and friends of the \TeX{} world.
+
+The next day, the Monday, was kept free to allow people to
+register and to meet one another. On arrival everybody was given a
+copy of the Proceedings, and an extremely useful typographic ruler,
+and the traditonal mug, with the specially designed Euro\TeX94 logo,
+showing a paper origami boat in the foreground, symbol of Gda\'nsk
+and its famous shipyard, on a dark background (the Baltic sea),
+and the words Euro\TeX'94 in a light sky at the top. Very nice
+stylistic work, indeed!
+
+The conference had a total of 57 participants coming from 15 different
+countries, with the Polish (19) and German (13) representations being
+the largest, while there were also \TeX\ users from Belgium, Canada,
+the Czech Republic, France, Hungary, Lithuania, the Netherlands,
+Norway, Russia, Slovenia, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the
+United States. All those who had arrived by 1 o'clock in the afternoon
+were taken by bus on a guided tour of the most interesting parts of
+Gda\'nsk.
+
+The formal opening of the conference was on Tuesday morning, and
+after the usual opening speeches by the organisers, Petr
+Sojka walked us through the various aspects of hyphenation
+with \TeX{} and described the significant success that has been
+obtained recently, especially in the case of multi-lingual
+documents. Bernd Raichle demonstrated how useful it is to use
+\TeX's mouth to process data and showed how he had applied these
+ideas to implement a quicksort algorithm. Klaus Lagally, the
+author of the multi-lingual Arab\TeX\ system, explained in his talk
+how he solved, staying within standard \TeX, the problem of
+line-breaking inside paragraphs with text that runs both from
+right to left (like English) and from left to right (like Arabic
+or Hebrew), thus providing a really portable solution. The
+techniques described were successfully used to process a
+forty-page paper containing mixed English and Hebrew with some
+Arabic and even Latin or other short language fragments, and it
+showed how flexible and powerful the basic \TeX\ typesetter really
+is. Just before lunch Marion Neubauer told us about her
+experiences with converting Word and WordPerfect documents from
+and to \LaTeX\ and I am sure many of those present would
+agree with her finding that unless the elements of the document
+are already clearly marked up in the source, the \LaTeX\ document
+obtained was hardly usable, and that converting rather complex
+documents is in any case a time-consuming process. The answer
+might be using an editor in conjunction with an internal
+conversion program.
+
+The afternoon session started with a description by Olga Lapko of
+the \MF\ package developed at Mir Publishers in Moscow and
+distributed as part of the CyrTUG-emtex package. It contains the
+\MF\ sources of a completely redesigned Russian Computer
+Modern-like font family, which is more adapted to Russian
+typographic tradition than previous Computer Modern Cyrillic
+fonts. Yannis Haralambous then gave a detailed overview of the
+$\Omega$ system, a 16-bit extension to \TeX{} that uses the Unicode
+standard as internal encoding and allows multiple input and output
+character encodings. He described various applications, including
+calligraphic poetry, mixtures of languages with many special
+characters, vowelized Arabic, fully diacriticized Greek, and
+correctly kerned Khmer. Finally, Kees van der Laan gave us an
+overview of his BLUe's (Ben Lee User) Format. At the user level
+this new format is supposed to facilitate the creation,
+formatting, exchange and maintenance of compuscripts during the
+complete lifetime of a publication. The format is easily
+customizable and provides for the possibility of having
+cross-references using a one-pass process. I found it an
+interesting approach since Kees introduced many ideas from modern
+software engineering practice.
+
+That evening, we had the traditional Euro\TeX\ banquet, with a lot
+of atmosphere, champagne, wine, plenty of beer, good food, guitar
+playing and singing by several of the participants --- in a word
+(or two) --- a hell of an evening, with \TeX\ and \LaTeX\ (almost)
+forgotten and other themes such as family, children, politics,
+philosophy, ``real life'', in short, becoming the main subjects of
+the evening, and it was not before we were all convinced that we
+had solved all of the world's problems that we went to bed in the
+early morning hours.
+
+So, the next morning at breakfast, it came as a shock to many of
+us that there were still a few unsolved problems left (mainly in
+the area of \TeX, of course) and so we decided to continue the
+conference and turn our attention to the niceties of colour
+techniques and their realization in \LaTeXe. I emphasized in my
+part of the first talk of the day that colour is rarely needed in
+normal text, and that when it is used, the function of each colour
+should be unambiguously clear. There exist many (empirical) rules
+about colour harmonies and only a lot of experience and practice
+allows one to become an expert in this field and apply colours
+efficiently. Sebastian Rahtz then showed how \LaTeXe\ implements a few
+simple tools for obtaining colour and he presented some nice
+examples. Janusz Bie\'n gave an overview of different standards
+connected with the Polish language (keyboards, character
+encodings, localisation, fonts layout) and put them into
+perspective relative to developments of the international
+standards bodies. Yannis Haralambous described his Tiqwah
+(``Hope'' in Hebrew) system for typesetting Biblical Hebrew, going
+into some detail on issues of font design, classical Hebrew
+typography and the user interface. He hoped that his system would
+help to revive the interest in Biblical Hebrew typography.
+Vladimir Batagelj gave an introduction to the PostScript language,
+and presented some of his experience in combining \TeX{} and
+PostScript. Karel Hor\'ak gave an overview on how one can decompose
+large \MF\ pictures into smaller fragments and described
+techniques to place them on a page in a seamless way. He stressed
+the importance of resolution dependence and hoped that the new
+versions of some of the drivers would eliminate most of the
+constraints of this powerful approach where one only uses \TeX{} and
+\MF\ to generate pictures, thus making the whole document
+fully portable.
+
+ Bogus\l{}aw Jackowski and Marek Ry\'cko showed some extremely nice and
+pleasing pictures made with \MF\ (and their paper was rightly
+given the prize of Best Paper in a ballot amongst all conference
+participants at the end of the conference). They demonstrated some
+examples of non-standard \MF\ programming and advocated the
+creation of libraries of \MF\ routines, that would make the
+use of \MF\ as a universal drawing tool much more appealing.
+\'Eric Picheral, who looks after the Unix part of the GUTenberg \TeX{}
+archive, gave an overview of the history of that archive, the
+various steps required to adapt \TeX\ and its companion programs to
+the needs of the French-speaking \TeX\ user community, and the way
+the various versions (Unix, PC, Mac) are made available to users
+worldwide via the Internet (ftp, http/www, gopher).
+
+Lutz Birkhahn
+discussed his work on developing debugging tools for \TeX{} and
+presented Tdb, an extension to \TeX{} that provides an interface to
+the Tk/Tcl X11 toolkit. This allowed him to set up a graphical
+user interface to allow one to set breakpoints, have stepwise
+execution, and to look at macro definitions and the value of
+variables. The last talk of the day was by Philip Taylor, who
+advocated the virtues of defensive programming for \TeX\ since in
+the real world one cannot assume that user code or input is
+correct. Hence it is the task of the programmer to make sure that
+the results of developed macros are as close as possible to those
+the users expect. Defensive programming techniques let the
+programmer anticipate both errors in data and flaws in algorithm
+design.
+
+During the first talk on the last day of the Conference I had the
+pleasure of giving a 20-minute talk about the lessons learned when
+writing \emph{The \LaTeX\ Companion}. I once more tried to emphasize the
+importance of generic markup for all logical elements of the
+document. Also, the global design of the book should be discussed
+at an early stage, while formatting decisions should be left to
+the final stage of running the chapters into pages. Wietse Dol and
+Erik Frambach then gave a very impressive talk-demonstration of
+their 4\TeX\ workbench, that also forms the basis of the extremely
+succesfull NTG CD-ROM. It is without doubt the best integrated \TeX{}
+system for the MS-DOS world, and many participants who wanted to
+know more about the system also took part in the full day tutorial
+that they ran on the Friday. J\"org Knappen discussed work going on
+to standardize the IPA characters, and advocated the creation of a
+256-character IPA font for use with \TeX. Ji\v{r}\'{\i} Zlatu\v{s}ka talked
+about work he was doing within the framework of \LaTeXe\ to allow
+different languages and encoding schemes to be used together in a
+same format, at the same time providing mechanisms to switch
+freely between languages and encodings. Friedhelm Sowa showed his
+approach to generate colour pictures, especially on cheap
+printers. He discussed how the dvi driver must be colour conscious
+and gave as an example the dvidjc drivers and the latest version
+of his BM2FONT program, that provides the four primary colours of
+the pictures by generating four different bitmap images. He showed
+some quite impressive pictures as examples of his approach but he
+pointed out that colour is not simple to realize and great care
+must be taken to obtain the effects one really intends.
+
+The afternoon session began with two presentations about \LaTeXe,
+the first by Johannes Braams, who gave a clear introduction to the
+principles of class files and packages, as he showed using simple
+examples how it is possible to transform \LaTeX 2.09 styles into
+\LaTeXe\ classes and packages. Dag Langmyhr, in the second talk,
+gave an explicit example of how to roll one's own complete \LaTeXe\
+document class, and detailed the various stages of building up the
+necessary ingredients by borrowing from existing examples,
+introducing (small) changes into existing constructs, and
+incorporating the functionality of supplementary packages.
+%He
+%showed convincingly that customizing \LaTeX\ classes to obtain a
+%certain house style or specific look and feel is not very
+%difficult and he hoped that his listeners would now be able to
+%create their own document classes.
+
+Before the official part of the 1994 Euro\TeX\ Conference came to a
+close, Philip Taylor and the $\varepsilon$\TeX\ and NTS team presented
+an overview of the present status of these two projects. The first
+one is based on the existing \TeX\ code, and plans to extend it in
+various areas, while keeping 100\% backward compatibility with \TeX\
+for those who want it. The NTS project, on the other hand, seeks
+to first reimplement \TeX\ in a list language, so that several
+alternative approaches to the various components that build the
+system can be more easily tested. In the longer run it might thus
+be possible to develop a New Typesetting System (hence the name)
+that will be at least as good as \TeX, but that extends or improves
+\TeX\ in areas where the latter is considered too limited.
+
+
+These last eighty minutes or so about futures were followed by
+closing remarks from W\l{}odek Bzyl and Philip Taylor of the
+Organizing Committee, who announced the winners of the Best Paper
+contest (see above), who were given a bottle of vodka with tiny
+pieces of gold floating inside (a local speciality), and the venue
+of the next Conference, that is to take place next year somewhere
+in the Netherlands (possibly in the (now) famous town of
+Maastricht).
+
+Yes, it had been a good conference, and quite different
+from the 1994 TUG Annual meeting, whose theme was ``innovation'',
+so that many papers described more or less exotic, front-line
+developments (colour, sophisticated page layout, object-oriented
+techniques), while in Gda\'nsk more attention was given
+to practical issues of typesetting in multiple languages and working
+with cheap printers and machines (hyphenation, the use of
+\MF, MS-DOS related developments). I can only congratulate
+the local organizers, especially Wlodek Bzyl and Tomek
+Przechlewski, for their nice work, and I hope that this conference
+has contributed to making \TeX\ better known in Poland, and that
+those present will take with them the ``spirit'' of Sobieszewo,
+where it was shown how to put principles into practice to make
+progress in the field of applying \TeX\ in real-world applications
+(a copy of the 200-page Proceedings of the Euro\TeX94 Conference,
+which, as mentioned above, were available on the Monday thanks to
+the hard work of Tomek and Wlodek, can be obtained by sending 15
+DM (postage included) to Wlodek Bzyl, Instytut Matematyki,
+Uniwersytet Gdanski, Wita Stwosza 57, PL 80-952, Poland).
+
+See you next year, some time, somewhere, they were saying. And
+indeed they will.
+\end{Article}
+\endinput
+, who had
+already arrived the day before. The hotel had nice rooms,
+comfortable lecture theaters; and the organizing Committee of the
+Polish user group GUST made available two PC's, a printer and a
+photo-copying machine, so that those who wanted to exchange
+software had the necessary infrastructure, while many of the
+participants came with their own notebooks (PC's, Mac's, a
+Sparcbook). The drop in price of these machines (I now have one
+myself!) allows users to readily take their development or
+production systems with them and demonstrate their work. They
+allow allow one to test new ideas immediately, and that is very
+important in developers' environments, like the ones that most of
+those attending \TeX{} conferences are dealing with. It also makes it
+possible to make notes, without the need to retype them
+afterwards, and to distribute documentation in a flexible way. In
+fact the hard disk of my Notebook PC contained a lot more Mbytes
+of data and source files when I left Sobieszewo than when I
+arrived, and it will take some time before I can put to good use
+all the goodies I got from various friends at the conference.
+
+..
+On Friday, most participants stayed on to attend one or more of
+four tutorials, namely on 4TeX (Wietse Dol and Erik Frambach),
+Manmac BLUe's (Kees van der Laan), Book design and Typography
+(Marek R\'ycko and Philip Taylor), and \LaTeX2e (with Johannes
+Braams and myself). In the afternoon, a 20-hour course by Marek
+and Phil on advanced \TeX{} macro writing started.
+
+
+The LaTeX2e tutorial and advanced \TeX{} course went on the Saturday,
+while on the Sunday only Marek and Phil had enough energy to go on
+speading the \TeX{} word, this time no longer at the Sobieszewo
+Center, but on the computers in Gda\'nsk University. Thus, when I
+left around 11 o'clock on Sunday October 2nd, I left behind me
+three floors of (almost) empty rooms. Also a Babel-like mixture of
+East and Western-European languages no longer floated through the
+corridors.
+...
+When I stepped into the Fokker 50 to fly back to Copenhagen (and
+from there on to Geneva), I realized that I had witnessed how
+Summer had become Autumn. The trees were putting on their nice
+yellow-brown dresses, and were waving their heads in the breeze,
+that had become definitely cooler in only a week's time. They were
+preparing for their last party, before going into a long winter
+sleep.